


How the AO3 Could Be The Awesomest Filk Archive Ever

by Elf (Elfwreck)



Series: Filk & the AO3 [2]
Category: No Fandom
Genre: Filk, Gen, Meta, Nonfiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-07
Updated: 2011-05-07
Packaged: 2021-03-01 04:08:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,051
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23159062
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elfwreck/pseuds/Elf
Summary: If the AO3 wants to support filk the way it supports fanfic, it would need some changes, and support for features it doesn't currently have, or are very hard to arrange. Possibly, it'd need an entirely separate filk archive.
Series: Filk & the AO3 [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1664758
Comments: 3
Kudos: 2
Collections: March Meta Matters Challenge





	How the AO3 Could Be The Awesomest Filk Archive Ever

_Do not meddle in the affairs of bards, for they are unsubtle, and your name scans to Greensleeves_ \-- filk proverb.

If the AO3 wants to support filk the way it supports fanfic, it would need some changes, and support for features it doesn't currently have, or are very hard to arrange. Possibly, it'd need an entirely separate filk archive.

I can certainly understand why filk support has been limited. Few people involved with the OTW primarily think of themselves as "filkers," so there's not a lot of awareness of what's needed. And support for fic is well-understood; everything from coding features to expected drama levels are known quantities; resources are (relatively) easy to allocate. And it's not like filk communities have less fanwank than other ones—and ours are often delivered in verse.

If it did set up this kind of support, it'd be incredible. There are, AFAIK, _no_ multi-purpose general-all-filk lyric archives on the web. None. Certainly none that could support contests & collections & gift exchanges. I would _love love love_ to see an AO3-based filk archive—but it'd need features that support filk, which are different from what works best for fic. It would need to have: 

  * **A way to attach chords to the words.** This could be a toggle-switch for "put this in monospace & don't remove extra spaces" (nobody wants to count &nbsp's) or the AO3 could unleash its coders on the decades-old problem of linking a word (or syllable) in a line of lyrics to a chord label in the line above it. (Fix that one, and the filk community would sing the praises of the OTW for years. Literally.)
  * **A tag for main genre.** Filk isn't sorted by "fandom," and if filkers started putting their works at the AO3 (even ignoring the filk that doesn't have an identifiable "fandom" by AO3 standards), there'd suddenly be dozens, maybe hundreds more single-works fandoms—and filkers wouldn't be able to find the stuff they wanted, because we don't go looking for "filks about Cherryh's Downbelow Station;" we look for "spacer filk." 
  * **A way to indicate the tune.** This is different from crediting the author of the tune, which may be unknown. There are three main options here: Original tune, to-the-tune-of, and variant or "loosely" to-the-tune-of. (There's also "chorus is ttto one song; verses are ttto another." But those also tend to be somewhat loose.) 
  * **Notes.** Which AO3 already has, and does brilliantly well. Filk often needs context, in ways that fanfic usually doesn't; filk is short & intense enough that if you spend the first two verses trying to figure out POV, you've lost half the song. 
  * **Ideally, audio file storage.** In the long run, a filk archive should have a way to share lyrics, music sheets for those who have them, and sound files. Since AO3 plans to support vidding, I'd assume that sound files wouldn't be much of an additional drain on resources, but some coding effort would have to go into setting them up. And then it'd need a third credit: performer (maybe multiple performers: singer & musician), to add to lyric-writer and tunester. And there are filksongs with nonfilk lyrics: Leslie Fish has put a lot of Kipling's poetry to music. (Consider this as comparable to, oh, a scarf & hat knitted in Slytherin colors. There's nothing fannish the mundanes would notice, but we still acknowledge them as fanworks.)



In my ideal fannish world, where the AO3 supports all fanworks, there's a separate filk archive. It's built on the AO3 basic software but the labeling is very different—there's no het/slash/gen tag, no warnings, no WIP status. The basic open-source software would be tweaked & optimized for filk instead of fic:

  * **Originality** : Replace the slash/gen/het/etc. symbols with ones indicating originality: "original tune original lyrics," "lyrics to traditional tune," "lyrics to mainstream tune," "lyrics to another filk tune" and "other." 
  * **Spoilers** : Replace the "ratings" icons with "spoiler" icons—this filk contains spoilers for [book] [tv show] [movie] [other/multi] [no spoilers]. 
  * **Genre** : Replace the warnings tags with genre/tone: serious, funny, ose, bawdy, other. (Maybe some other filker would have a better idea what these should be.) (And "multi" is possible… we have [funny ose](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9kT1xIpZ4E).)
  * **Filky Fandoms** : Filks are sorted by fandoms as filkers understand them: fantasy, space, computers, writing, SCA, religion, metafilk about filking, metafilk about conventions, and so on. Maybe new genres like modern fantasy. Maybe media-tie-ins are indicated somehow. 
  * **Audio hosting** : There's an easy spot for a link to an audio file… maybe multiple audio files. (Performed by author; performed by singer of original tune; performed by BNF; performed live at OVFF, whatever.)
  * **Tune of** : There's a spot in the header for lyric author, tune author, to-the-tune-of song title. TTTO author generally not mentioned unless it's another filker, because who knows who wrote The Twelve Days of Christmas? (JS Bach. I looked it up. But if you list tune author as Bach, people will stare at you all funny-like.)
  * **Chords/sheet music** : The presentation of lyrics allows for chords, and allows them to be left out. There's a spot for "upload sheet music if you've got it." (And have the rights to it. Here's another opportunity, like vidding, to trigger lawsuits from mega-corporations! And the RIAA isn't like those wishy-washy folks at Paramount and Time-Warner for lawsuits.) 



… And so on. The current structure of the archive could be terrific for filk; the details in how it's set up are heavily skewed towards fanfic. (And AO3 needs to start thinking of some of these issues soon anyway… how is "One Night Fandoms" going to be tagged for fandoms?)

I don't know if the AO3 wants to support filk directly; if not, I'm content to wait for more-or-less stable software, and eventually I'll nag my filky code-obsessed friends into grabbing the software & start tinkering with it to make it suitable for a filk archive. But that has the same problems as every other archive on the web: owner loses job and forgets to pay the webhost, and poof, it's gone; one C&D from lawyers from the estate of Michael Jackson, and all the Beatles-tune filksongs are thrown out; one divorce in the filking community and a third of the archive is deleted for spite. I'd much rather the AO3 hosted a filk archive.

**Author's Note:**

> Originally at <http://elf.dreamwidth.org/415507.html>, where there are comments.


End file.
